It is easy to recount individually all that I met: a lusty Yankee beggar who hailed me as a brother one blistering July day, not far from the Connecticut border, when I was making for Garrisons; a cynical wraith, who rose, seemingly, from the dust of the road, in the warm twilight of a September evening, in eastern Pennsylvania and scoffed at my hope of finding work in Sweet Valley; a threadbare, white-haired German with a truly fine reserve and courtesy, who so far warmed to me, when we met in the frosty air of late November, on the bare, level stretch of a country road between Cleveland and Sandusky, as to tell me that he had walked from Texas, and was on his way to the home of friends near Boston; then Farrell, in central Illinois; and finally, a blear-eyed, shaggy knave, trudging the sleepers of the Union Pacific in western Nebraska, his rags bound together and bound on with strings, and a rollicking quality in his cracked voice, who must have had difficulty in avoiding work among the short-handed gangs of navvies along the line. All this is by way of fruitless explanation that I myself was not a tramp, but a workman, living by day’s labor; a fruitless explanation, because a reputation once established is difficult to dislodge. I have grown accustomed to references to my “tramp days,” even among those who knew my purpose best, and I had no sooner returned to my university than I found that to its members I was already known as “Weary,” in which alliterative appellation I saw the frankest allusion to a supposed identification with the “Weary Willies” of our “comic” prints. And having incurred the name, I may as well lay bare the one day that I tramped with a tramp. I am not without misgivings in speaking of Farrell as a tramp. He had held a steady job some weeks before, and our day together ended as we shall see; but if I was a hobo, so was he, and although clearly not of the strictest sect, and perhaps of no true sect at all, yet let us grant that, for the time, we both were tramps. The line of a railway was an unusual course, for I much preferred the country roads as offering better walking, and far more hope of meeting the people that I wished to know. Heavy rains, however, had made the roads almost impassable on foot, and I was walking the sleepers from necessity. The spring of 1892 had been uncommonly wet. The rains set in about the time that I quit work with a gang of roadmakers on the Exposition grounds. So incessant were they that it grew difficult to leave Chicago on foot, and when, in the middle of May, I did set out, I got only as far as Joliet, when I had to seek employment again. At the yards of the Illinois Steel Company I was taken on and assigned to a gang of laborers, mostly Hungarians. But my chief association of a week’s stay there is with a boarding-house, and especially its landlady.